Woman's Hour - Susan Sontag, Feminist economics, Waad-al-Kateab

Episode Date: September 12, 2019

Susan Sontag, the American essayist, novelist and critic rose to fame in the 1960s. She became an iconic cultural figure and during her life she was linked with figures like Andy Warhol and Annie Leibovitz. Fifteen years after her death, Benjamin Moser has written a new biography about her which digs beneath her public image. He discusses her life, her work and how her life charts the changes in women's lives over the last 60 years. It’s 30 years since the concept of intersectionality was introduced by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. The Women’s Budget Group, who are also marking their 30th anniversary, thought it apt to address the way feminist economics has embraced the idea that there is no single universal experience of inequality shared by all women. Next week, the Director of the group Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson will chair a panel on Intersectionality in Feminist Economics. She joins Jenni along with Dr Zubaida Haque from the Runnymede Trust and Angela Matthews from the Business Disability Forum to discuss why a one size fits all policy doesn’t work. Waad al-Kateab has documented her life on camera in war torn Aleppo, Syria. While conflict, violence, death and cruelty raged around her, she fell in love, got married and had a baby daughter. She captures stories of loss, laughter, sacrifice and survival. She joins Jenni to discuss her film, ‘For Sama’, a love letter from a young mother to her daughter. And, listener Val Dawson talks about the photograph that captures her best day. Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Ruth Watts

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Thursday the 12th of September. A film called For Sama has been described as one of the most affecting war documentaries. Wad El-Khatib filmed Death, Destruction and Hope from 2012 to 2016 in her home city of Aleppo in Syria. Her work is dedicated to the daughter to whom she gave birth as the war raged around her. 30 years since the term intersectionality was introduced, how is it applied to economics? Why does a one-size economic policy not fit all? And how might it be improved?

And another in our series, My Best Day. Val Dawson sent a picture of herself as a child in the Second World War. Susan Sontag rose to prominence in the early 60s to become one of New York's most revered intellectuals.

She was closely linked to Andy Warhol, popularised the use of the word camp, famously had a hairstyle of long black locks with a prominent grey streak at the front, and she wrote influential novels and essays, perhaps the most famous of which was Illness as Metaphor, which she wrote after she was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1975. In one of her last interviews in 2002,

she spoke on Radio 3 and discussed the difference between an essay and a novel. The fiction comes from a deeper place and a broader place. I have access to much more of myself in my fiction than I do in my essays. I mean, I feel my essays, the voice in the essays is a kind of construction. And through timidity and shyness, I have a lot of difficulty speaking of myself

because I really think, well, I'm not so interesting and it's not so important. And anyway, I don't want people to believe or think something because it has anything to do with me. I mean, an example that was much remarked on, and yet I still want to defend it, was a long essay that was published as a little book called Illness as Metaphor. I wrote this book when I was told that I was going to die in six months or a year of cancer. I was in stage four, which is terminal, of advanced disseminated breast cancer.

And that's when I was writing that book. And yet I didn't say it in the book. And people thought I must be very cold or detached. Well, I wasn't anything of the kind. I was living in a state of total grief and terror and everything that you could imagine if you were told you were going to die. But I had an insight about the meaning of cancer and the way that the idea of cancer was manipulated to make people feel guilty or ashamed. It was an illness that was surrounded by a taboo.

But I didn't think that I should say, well, as I was, you know, sitting in the day room at the end of the hall, I heard somebody saying, of course, as a matter of fact, I have cancer and I'm not doing so well. I just presented it as an argument. And then I was quite surprised that people said I was so detached. I wasn't detached at all. Maybe it's just a very old-fashioned idea. Oh, you know, Lisa, these things are so old and deep in us. I could tell you that my mother used to reproach me when I was a child. Not that I want to blame my mother for the way I am now, but I remember she used to reproach me when I was a child if I said I too often. She would say that's the third sentence in the last two minutes where you started with an I. I had a very censorious, difficult mother. So, I mean, I am perhaps just to the stupidest fact of a very severe and repressive childhood upbringing,

rather self-conscious when I say I, when I refer to myself. I mean, you might say, well, what am I doing now? But I've learned, you know, how to play the interview role. But the truth is, way deep down, of course, I would like to be invisible. Well, Susan Sontag developed cancer again in 1998 and died in 2004 at the age of 71. Benjamin Moser has written her biography called simply Sontag, Her Life. Benjamin, what prompted you to write a huge biography of a woman you never met? Well, I was fascinated after having written a previous biography

of Clarice Lispector, the great Brazilian novelist of the 20th century, by this world of the great female intellectuals. I thought there was a whole lot there that was very exciting. And I also thought at the same time there was a lot that wasn't being said. And there was also a lot that was quite shocking. And I think that it seemed like a whole world that was getting more and more relevant rather than less relevant as the obvious victories of feminism had been won. You know, the right to vote, the right to control one's own body through contraception and abortion, which is in my country never something we take for granted. It was always a fight.

Rights in employment and divorce and in the family. And yet there was this whole legacy that I thought had not been appreciated because it was a little less dramatic, maybe. So what are the most important things that you think, say, young women now could learn from Susan Sontag? I think that women as a category is a fascinating thing, because as with a lot of words that come up in Sontag's life, whether it's America or communism or democracy, the word woman has very different meanings according to different times. You know,

if you think that even about the transgender movement now, even the biological definitions are under question. And I think that when you look at Sontag, who started out as a lesbian, first of all, and in a world where she had one role model as a female, you know, as a girl intellectual who wanted to be an intellectual, and that was Madame Curie. And actually, Madame Curie was the only woman that popular culture offered to girls, as an example. Now, she mentioned her mother in the extract we heard just now. What was her early life like? Well, her early life was very sad and tormented by the loss of her father, who was a very brilliant man who came out of the Jewish slums of New York and who became very wealthy by the time he was in his early 20s and then died in China

when she was five years old. Her mother didn't tell her. Her mother, who didn't like to speak of I, was extremely repressive of her and didn't really encourage her to know things or to do anything. And she was an alcoholic who would just step out of the room with her to know things or to do anything. And she was an alcoholic who would just step out of the room with her vodka when things got a little turbulent. And she grew up almost without, not only without intellectual or artistic role models, but also just without the role model that a girl needs in her mother.

So how did she come to be part of the New York jet set in the early 60s? Well, it's quite extraordinary. I asked and asked, how did Susan Sontag become so famous? Because she wrote these essays that were, you know, about difficult French intellectuals and about obscure films that nobody had ever seen. And I come from a country, I guess it's always a question of whether Britain or America is more barbaric. But, you know, this is America is not a country. America is not a country where young women who write about French intellectuals become famous. It had never happened before. And she did it by catching something about a moment in which all these definitions were changing. And the essay notes on camp that was just the feature, the inspiration for the Met Gala in New York and an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that got millions of visitors,

this captured something that was changing about what a woman should be and also what gay people should be. And that really made her popular in a way that very few intellectuals in America had ever been. She had a very lively sex life, I think one might describe it as, even as a teenager with both men and women. But then she married Philip Reif, an academic. And she was very young when she married him, 17, I think. Why do you suppose she allowed him to publish a book she had written on Freud under his name? She was always, she grew up without parents. She was always looking for

a role model, for someone to help her out in her ambitions of writing and learning and being a thinker. And she latched onto this older professor at the University of Chicago, married him after knowing him. Well, no, they got engaged after a week and they got married at a hamburger joint in California after a month. And she started off as his ghostwriter. She started off helping him with research. And then as these things did often at that time, it evolved into her doing all the writing and all the work. At the same time she was doing that, and she spent nine years on the Freud book. It's called The Mind of the Moralist.

It's an excellent book, which I hope will be republished under the name Susan Sontag at some point. It sort of started off in a research advisory role. And then she wrote it. And by the time she had finished it, the merits had broken up and she had a child. And at that time in my country and in others, women could lose their children for all sorts of reasons. And one of the reasons you could lose your child

was for being gay. So is that why she never contested? She exchanged her book for her child. And yeah, I mean, it almost makes tears come to my eyes. I've spent seven years on this book, you know, Sontag, Her Life. She spent almost the same amount or maybe a little longer on the Freud book. And the thought that you would have to do all that work for all those years and put all that heart and soul into something and then have a gun held to your head in the form of your own child it's just um it's shocking that of course was her son David who

actually I interviewed on a woman's hour not long after after she died as far as notes on camp was concerned which you you mentioned a moment ago how true is it that she helped change Western attitudes to homosexuality? It's absolutely true. One of the things that I was most excited about in the archives was discovering a draft of this manuscript called Notes on Homosexuality, which was the original title. And of course you read camp as homosexuality now, but back then the amount of coding and, and shaded language and little wink, wink words that you used was immense. And this thing appeared, it's hilarious. It's a lot of fun. It's very, um, frisky. Maybe you would say it appeared in the ultimate fortress of New York intellectual snobbery, which was a magazine called Partisan Review. And it's absolutely impossible for us, when we look back at our history, whether we look at it from the female perspective,

or the gay perspective, or the black perspective, or all these things that have changed, I think it's really important to see her as a key to how these changes happened. Because it's almost impossible for us really to realize how shocking this essay was. Because now we think it's kind of fun. And it is fun. It holds its own quite well. But for a gay person to write about aesthetics as a gay person was absolutely unheard of. And she didn't actually say it. She just lets you think it. What would you say was the impact of illness as metaphor, which again, she mentioned in the interview that we heard?

I had access to her secret archives, which was one of the exciting things about doing this project. And in the book, I integrate them quite well, I hope, without saying, you know, this is from this part of the archive or the other part of the archive. But one of the things in the archive that's absolutely fascinating are the letters from cancer patients. When she started off, cancer was a disease of sexual shame. I had never heard this. I was born the year after she got cancer in 1976. Well, she got cancer in 75. I was born in 76.

I had never heard that cancer was a disease of sexual repression and people who were not fun and all this kind of stuff. I had never heard these myths about this at all. People wouldn't tell patients that they had cancer. Clarice Lispector died in 1977, never told that she had cancer. And so you see these letters in the archive thanking her for taking away this shame. And several people said, you know, I know I have to die. I know that there's no medical hope for me, but at least I'm dying without feeling it's my fault. Benjamin Moser, thank you very much indeed for being with

us this morning. Fascinating woman. Sontag, Her Life by Benjamin Moser. Thank you very much for being with us. Now, 30 years ago, Professorley Crenshaw invented the word intersectionality to describe how women of different classes and races have different needs when it comes to feminist politics. In the same year the Women's Budget Group was formed and they're planning a discussion in London next Wednesday called Intersectionality in Feminist Economics to examine whether economic planning has embraced the idea that women's needs may be different from men's, but also that not all women have the same requirements. Well, Dr Zubeda Haque represents the Runnymede Trust, Angela Matthews is Head of Policy for the Business Disability Forum, and Dr Marianne Stevenson is Director of the UK Women's Budget Group.

Why, Marianne, did you want to highlight this question? Well, as you said, it's our 30th anniversary. It's 30 years since Kimberley Crenshaw came up with the concept or used the word intersectionality to describe something that people had been talking about for a long time. And in those 30 years, we've been doing a lot of work about the impact of economic policy on women. And one of the things that's very clear from our work, including work that we did with the Runnymede Trust a couple of years ago, is that economic policy doesn't just affect women

differently from men, it affects different groups of women differently. So, for example, our report on the impact of austerity showed that poorer black and Asian women were hardest hit by spending cuts compared to, for example, white women or richer men. And we also did another briefing looking at how disabled women had been particularly badly affected by austerity. So we thought we wanted to go beyond just that focus on one particular policy area to step back a bit and say how when we're doing our thinking about how economic policy affects women differently, how can we make sure we think about the diversity of women and the ways in which race and disability and class and gender all intersect. So, Beda, one of the big questions is the question of caring roles where some are paid often at low rates or not paid at all. How do you tackle that huge question? Well, we start from the fact, we start from the argument that there is no such thing

as a non-working women. All women are working. The difference is we're just not paying women who are doing one of the most fundamental roles in the economy, which is caring. And at the moment, caring is an undervalued work. It's an underappreciated work, and it's certainly not paid. And yet, just think, every single one of us is carers at one point in our lives. We're either caring for children, or we're being cared for, or we're caring for partners, or we're caring for our parents. We will care at every single stage of our life. And yet, that's not appreciated. And that's because it tends to be women doing the caring work. Angela what are the difficulties for disabled women when it comes to doing

unpaid work? Yes absolutely well we've seen a lot of this for disabled women graduates as well who are getting really fantastic degrees these are, bright young women, but they have a disability. So they graduate with a degree, often a first or a 2.1, so really great degrees. And they are going into perhaps voluntary roles because they can't get into paid employment. Why are they finding it so difficult? So a couple of reasons.

First of all, there's just the old chestnut of workplaces Why are they finding it so difficult? of what flexible work needs to be. We think of flexible work as maybe starting a bit later or finishing a bit earlier, when actually disabled people, and particularly we've seen a lot of disabled women tell us, actually, I'd like to start a lot earlier, have a bigger break during the day, and then carry on work later into the evening. And there are still a reduced number of roles

who really are flexible to that degree. Marianne I know that getting women back to the workplace was supposed to help tackle one of the big problems that we have child poverty why did that not work? Well this is an example of what happens when you don't think about how policy affects women and men differently. So the government's strategy on tackling poverty and child poverty in particular was focused on paid work. But what we know is that for women in particular, paid work isn't necessarily a route out of poverty. So a very high proportion of children living in poverty are living in a household with a working parent and for lone parents in particular it's very difficult to work full-time

hours they may not want to work full-time hours they've got other caring responsibilities which means that paid work alone will never be enough to to lift women out of poverty particularly because of the unpaid care work that Zubeda was talking about. And Zubeda, we've heard from Angela how difficult it can be for disabled women to find flexible work. How available genuinely is it to different forms of women?

Different forms? That's the wrong word, isn't it? Forms, but you know what I mean. If it's okay, I'd like to talk about ethnic minority women. I mean, Run Amid Trust, we're a race equality think tank, so we look at women and men across all different ethnic groups. And Marianne mentioned the issue, as you did, about how child poverty restricts women working and the cost of childcare, the availability of affordable childcare and so on. And what we need to understand

is that black and ethnic minority women don't just suffer from sexism within the labour market and outside of the labour market. They're also suffering from racism within the labour market and outside of the labour market. On top of that, we know that black and ethnic minority families are much more likely to be poorer. We know that half of Bangladeshi and Pakistani families, about 40% of black families are all likely to live in poverty. We know that 60% of children in poverty live in working families. So poverty is a huge burden on black and ethnic minority families and particularly restricts black and ethnic minority women as does the austerity cuts we know that that has had a significant impact on black and ethnic minority women i know angela you've done a piece of work on equality in the workplace focused on men

yes what did you find yes absolutely um i must just this, that it wasn't a comparison between women's experiences and men's experiences. It was just men. So this was actually a response we're still seen as protector and that's a quote protector breadwinner that's another quote um from the men we interviewed and and we are seen like that and we don't like it we don't want to be this we because it's a it's a it's a huge pressure particularly in the workplace and lots of men um my team spoke to were saying, quote, always switched on, and I'm expected to stay later because I'm a breadwinner for my family. So, Marianne, how do you begin to change the focus of the economy and the way we measure success? Is it the person who stays late, who's considered successful?

I think one of the problems is that traditionally when we think about the economy, we think about the bits that we can see, the exchange of goods and services in the marketplace, paid work, all of those things that are about money and what happened, the movement of money between different people. And we're not considering the unpaid economy, so the world of care, for example. And yet, as Zubeda said, you know, we all give and receive care at different points in our lives. Care is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. It's also a fundamental part of what makes a successful economy.

You can't assume that the women at home who are economically inactive, to use the sort of technical term, are not actually doing something. They are looking after their children. So if those women enter the paid labour market, you have to think about who provides the care, how are we going to make sure that those care needs are met? And this is particularly important at the moment. You know, we have an ageing society and people are living longer, which is a good thing.

But we have a huge crisis in adult social care at the moment. The government last week had to put extra money into social care just for a year, just to stop it collapsing this year. It doesn't deal with the underlying crisis that's ongoing. So we need to rethink the way we look at the economy, to not just look at GDP, but also to think about human well-being, to think about how does the economy support care? How can we build a caring economy? But Angela, who's responsible for changing that kind of culture? Is it business or is it government?

It's a fascinating question because we need to, as Marianne said, we need to look at what needs to be changed and when to stop the things like social care collapsing. The kind of the benefit and the incentive for business to be at the front of changing that is that they can probably do it quicker than the government could in terms of driving change. But why would they?

Why would business be interested in it when they're concerned about making money? So the incentive is to make money, I need happy staff. I need happy staff. I need staff who are happy at work, who are interested in working hard, but also in a work-life balance as well. And we're seeing in a competitive market, job market, when you get to a certain managerial level,

it does get more competitive, even among disabled people. People can be more choosy about the the employers they work for so we do have this this kind of um uh environment where um a disabled manager at managerial level are moving between employers because they will go with the employer who values well-being more how content do you think business is to make that kind of change in thinking well it's i think i think as is to make that kind of change in thinking? Well, I think, as Angela points out, it's certainly in their interest to have happier employees, but it's more than happier employees. I mean, actually, this isn't fundamentally,

it's not just a gender issue. We now have millennial men who are much happier to look after their children. They want to be with their children. They don't want to be at work all day. We have an ageing society. Some do. I mean, not all. Absolutely. And I think that's part of the problem, that women still take the disproportionate burden of that care. But it is changing and we've got an ageing society. So even if men didn't like it, they would still have to start caring for their parents, for instance. So I think with those dynamics, with those changing dynamics society as well, that there needs to be a national conversation in society about the assumptions around what is women's work, what is, you know, what's paid work, what's valuable work, and especially around care, we need to value that a lot more. Marianne, I know there is now a commission on gender equal

economy, which began this year. And I know you're not reporting until next year, but what are you hoping it will achieve? Well, one of the things that we wanted to do, a lot of the work that we do at the Women's Budget Group is analysing proposals from government and from opposition parties and saying how they will impact differently on women and men and so on. And what we wanted to do was come up with a set of proposals for how can we actually do things differently. You know, one of the things we often assume is, is the way the world is, is just a given. That's, that's just, it's like, you know, the air we breathe or gravity. And actually, it's not. We've created this society. We've created this economy. We can do things differently. We can organise ourselves in a different way. And

that's what we're hoping we'll be able to do. And we'd love to come on next time and talk to you about it. I'm sure we will invite you when you get it all together. Dr. Marianne Stevenson, Angela Matthews and Dr. Zubeda Haque, thank you all very much indeed for being with us. Now, still to come in today's programme, a film called For Summer. Documenting life in Aleppo as the bombs rained down. Why did Wad Al-Khatib try to film death, destruction and people trying to survive? And the serial, episode four

of Blackwater. Now I'm sure you recall that earlier in the summer we asked you to get in touch and send us a picture that somehow captured you at your best. Hundreds of you got in touch with pictures of your best day and so far we've spoken to two captured you at your best. Hundreds of you got in touch with pictures of your best day, and so far we've spoken to two of you about your photos. Today Val Dawson told Laura Thomas about a treasured wartime photograph. It shows a delightful little girl many, many years ago.

I hardly dare to remember how long ago it was, but it's always been a favourite of mine. My parents had it framed. It was always in the house anyway as far as I can remember I don't know who took it actually I have no idea I think it was in my grandfather's garden my grandparents in a town in Derbyshire called Belper I think it would be 1943 probably so um heck of a long time ago she's a cute little thing with red hair only this is a sadly a black and white photo i don't have any um photographs in color from that

period as one didn't of course i very clearly remember it being taken there and um sitting there it was obviously a sunny day a summer day, because of the little dress I had on, which is a polka dot, puff sleeves, of course, and a little Peter Pan collar, green with white spots. And of course, I had the usual little white ankle socks, and looking quite charming, I think. And our times have changed. But life was obviously good. Are you able to dig into that a bit more? It's extraordinary when you think what was going on in the world around us all. And I have only very vague memories of that time, really.

And of course, we were in a village, but then it wasn't that far from Derby. And of course, Derby was a town which would have been bombed anyway. But again, didn't register certainly with me at that age. How old do you think you were in this photo? Well, I reckon I probably was about five, four to five. And did you have brothers and sisters? Yes, I didn't have them then. I had twin brothers.

I still have twin brothers. And they were born in 1944. So during the war, my mother had twins. So I've been talking to so many different people about their photographs. And you, at the moment, are the only person that I have who has picked a picture of them as a child. Do you have a sense of why that might be? I don't really. I think it was just happy childhood. And I was married and divorced and I have two sons and I have seven grandchildren.

And I'm thinking, would they be sitting there having little photographs taken? Not quite the same, because they'd be holding phones and not holding as I seem to be. I seem to recall it was a little terracotta garden gnome, of all things, but I think he had a little cart with him or something as well. I do recall that. So I was just holding that, and I thought it seemed sweet and innocent and old-fashioned and rather warm and lovely in spite of what she, with this child, of course, was unaware of what was going on. The other reason I'm quite happy with it, it was sent to a magazine during that period. I'm not absolutely sure of the title. I think it was Woman's Pictorial, which my mother had every week or every month.

And in the back of it, I think it was a page where the Bonnie Baby's page. And I think I was probably Child of the Week or Child of the Month or something and featured in that. And they use this photograph. And that's why I think my mother was very, very thrilled with the whole thing. Very proud of it, I suppose, as well, because I had this lovely red hair, I wish I had it still. Lovely, lovely golden, dark auburn hair anyway, with lots of curls and waves and things, which were pretty unruly. And I think people seemed, for some reason or other, stopped her in the street and used to say,

what lovely hair this little girl had. They don't say that anymore, of course. So she was proud of you? Yes, I think so, yes. That's quite nice, really, because in fact in later years we didn't get on terribly well, which was a great shame. And looking back, a great sadness to me now,

looking back on it all, but it is a pity, because she wasn't very happy, I think, in that of years. But this is lovely to look back on anyway. Val Dawson was speaking to Laura Thomas. Now, I don't remember the last time I wept when watching a film, but yesterday I did, as I viewed For Summer, a documentary made by Wad Al-Khatib during her years living in her home city of Aleppo from 2011 to 2016, as the bombs fell incessantly on the civilian population.

The tears came when one limp little boy was brought into Ward's husband's hospital, followed by his two stunned brothers. The little one had died. Then there was a woman brought in unconscious and nine months pregnant, whose limp grey baby was delivered by caesarean section, and the staff struggled to bring him to life. The film goes on general release today and will be shown later next month on Channel 4. Wad, what prompted you to begin filming? I started as, I was just a student at Aleppo University when the revolution started. And we've seen in our own eyes how the media in Syria before,

it was all controlled by the regime and you can't really publish any single word if they didn't sign it off. And we've seen like a huge amount of protest in the street. And on the formal channels, they were saying that, like, there's nothing in Syria happening. And later on, they were trying to say that these people are terrorists. And they were speaking about us, about my daughter, about children, and these people can't be terrorists.

I felt the only way to document this and save this for the history, for ourselves, for the world outside, just to film this all. What was it like? I mean, it's unimaginable to think of living under that constant bombardment. I can't really describe this as much as I can tell people to see the film to feel the same experience exactly. But it's just like the main feeling all the time that I'm alive now for the last minute of our life. And you just feel how sometimes you are helpless to help others when you feel that I can't really do anything for them. Some of the feeling also which I can't protect my daughter,

I can't protect even myself, I can't really plan for tonight or for the next day. It's all, you feel all the time that this life will be finished at any moment. You met the man who would become your husband, Hamza, a doctor. And again, I just wondered what on earth was it like for you, filming in his hospital with injured people coming in all the time, blood everywhere. It's horrific to watch.

And you were there. We were living in that hospital. Even before we and Hamza got married, we lived in the hospital. And most of the staff was living there. So the hospital was for us part of it as a home and part of it as a job. And just being there filming this, it was just a huge responsibility of documenting all these faces and all these injuries, even if I know that I will not use it for any media purpose. But I know that this is all our crimes evidence. And we need to save all this for the future, for, like, a hope that the accountability will happen one day. But, you know, you keep thinking,

what were people thinking of her when she was filming? And then there's one scene where a woman hears her young son has been killed and comes to collect him, and she shrieks at you to go on filming. She says, carry on filming me me why do you think she did that i know that like part of the people in alipa were saying that this camera is uh like their way to be survive like they we have all that idea and that's why i kept filming we've thought that people outside the world the western countries when they have seen all these crimes happening in Syria and it's all for about civilians and it's all because of the freedom, because of the dignity, because of the shared

principles that we all should have agreed on. We felt that the world in 2011, 13, and 16, and unfortunately now 19, the world will not let that happen to civilians in this time of the world. And it was just like, it's still happening, unfortunately, and this is the main message of the film. There are scenes where you show your friends and your colleagues surviving, there's only one word for it, and they're dealing with diminishing food supplies, the delight of one of your friends over the discovery of a persimmon fruit, which she is longing to taste. How easy was it to find delight when day-to-day life was so dangerous? We were struggling to create that hope and that delight.

It's just really to stay alive. You need people like Salem and Afra, the other family in the film. You need, like, really face like Sama when you are so exhausted and so disappointed to look at her and it gives you all the hope. There's part of the film when people are playing chess in the street and children like swimming in a hole happened because of a barrel bump. All these feel like things you can just look at this and have a strength and facing all the horror that

was happening. There was an opportunity where you and your husband in Sama could have left. You went to Turkey because of a relative who needed to see you. Instead of leaving, you chose, through very dangerous circumstances, to come back. Why? We lived with these people in Aleppo specifically for five years, and we knew how important for anyone to be there for the safety of the people for the hope that we can share it all and Hamza as a doctor like there's a big huge need for him me as a journalist also like I have a lot of relationship with international channels

I know exactly I'm good at filming so I can really play a good role in that situation. And we can just like lift the people behind and think about our safety and our daughter and forget about the other children. And the big part of this was we lived through the first two years of the peaceful demonstration. And we have that huge responsibility that we need to try to make this difference for our life and for the other people. How dangerous was it for you and your husband to send out news reports? I mean, your films to Channel 4, and he gave reports too. This is the only way which we felt that we can tell the people outside what's happening.

Against the propaganda that the Russian and the Assad regime was trying to do about saying that all these people are terrorists, there's no civilians in these areas, and we've seen all these children. You can see in the film how many children and families are in the city. Just one part of what we felt that this is our responsibility to do and we felt that that could

change something in the in what happened. Why finally did you have to leave? We were forced to flee out of the city. All the three thousand million people, three thousand people who lived in Aleppo were forced to flee by agreement

between the Russian and the Turkish government to let the Assad regime control the city. And this was the only way for us to be survived. When I was watching the film, I saw you had your daughter, then you now have another daughter, you're settled in the UK. But looking back on the putting together of the film, as you've had to watch all that footage again, what do you suppose makes your work filming a siege and bombardment different from what a man might have done? The first thing and the first decision I've taken and I promised myself to do when I decided that this film will happen

was to be very honest, very honest to myself, very honest to other people and speak out about all my fears and all the bad feeling that I had, even if I had to say something out. But I felt that this is a big responsibility. I'm not telling the people just my story as a mother. I'm telling them the motherhood story in Aleppo. And I need people really to understand what war means. I directed the film with another director called Edward Watts, and I want to thank him for his great work with me in this. And we both felt that there was a very part of this about the female perspective of war and of motherhood and of filmmaking. And that was all during the time when I was filming the story in Aleppo for five years. I was talking to Ward Al-Khatib. Now, on the question of intersectionality and economics, Carol said, such a great discussion just now, raising issues of the value of caring

and the thoughtless policy changes made a few years ago, which specifically focused on getting women into the workplace, even when they had young children. I'm 60, I've worked two jobs with three children, it's been exhausting. I think women should be paid more for working, not less, as is so often the case. When we work, we still have to do all that other stuff that makes the world go round. Birthdays, Christmas, packed lunches, help on school trips, look after elderly parents. I so agree that the current situation is a social construct.

We can change it. Why not assume a four-day week for working as an option or equivalent hours, and also for school, more time to enjoy life? And Natalie said, on the work-life balance for women conversation, my husband finished working yesterday, so he can have a year to look after our two young boys. I'll be the sole earner. What's interesting is how many of our friends joke about him being

crazy to do it and seem to hate the idea of being full-time stay-at-home parents, both men and women. But his work was very reluctantly flexible and unfair in terms of letting women in the company work part-time, but very reluctant or refused to let a man do the same. Funnily, most of my friends say they wouldn't let their partner share maternity leave as they want it for themselves and feel they deserve it more than the man. So there's still huge problems with women letting men take on a more hands-on role, at the same time as moaning about being the primary caregiver, and also a problem with companies still not being fair when a man wants to work flexibly. Now do join me tomorrow when we'll be discussing the concerns of midwives about the role they're having to play in delivering government policy of charging migrant women for maternity

care. Join me tomorrow if you can, two minutes past ten. Bye bye. Russell Cain here and I'm here to tell you about Evil Genius, the BBC Radio 4 podcast, where we take icons from history and then decimate them by slinging mud. Think you know everything about Einstein? You don't. He was a woman hater. You probably think you know about Amy Winehouse, that she was a victim. She had a pretty dark side and we're not shy about exploring it. Evil Genius. We take people from history and a panel of three fellow jesters have to vote at the end of the show. No ifs, no buts, no grey areas, evil or genius. Plus hilarious banter as well. So head to BBC Sounds now and hit subscribe.

I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.